Sunday, May 10, 2009

Thanks to a very generous invitation from Ian, I enjoyed a tour of HMS Illustrious yesterday afternoon.

I will be the first to confess that I know almost nothing about the military so I had little idea what to expect.

I was pleasantly surprised by how welcoming the crew were and how keen to show us around and explain how things worked.

The first thing that struck me was quite how large it was:

The second most surprising thing was how much access they gave us. This is the "steering wheel":

And this is the ski-jump, which we were allowed to walk to the top of. I was pleased to see they had installed a small net to catch anybody who happened to fall off...

However, this was the only piece of pandering to the health-and-safety mafia. The James Bond-esque sinking floor was, gloriously, left entirely unprotected with fences or warning signs when it dropped away and left a gaping hole in the deck. Hurrah!

Even more impressive was the machinery that underpinned this little piece of magic:

So, thank you to Ian for the invitation and to the Royal Navy for opening themselves up to ignorant people like me.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I took the train to York yesterday for a customer meeting. The timing wasn't locked down until quite late so I wasn't able to book my ticket until Saturday evening.

So I was probably naive to be shocked by the prices quoted for the journey.

However, I played around with the "single tickets" option to get the price as low as possible and managed to get a reasonable fare by taking a hit on the (peak) outbound and getting a great deal on an off-peak "any train" ticket for the return journey.

However, it was only when I picked up the tickets from the machine at King's Cross on Monday morning that I realised that my off-peak return ticket was actually with "Grand Central" rather than with National Express East Coast.

Now this could have been a big problem: they only run three trains a day in each direction so it drastically reduced my options. However, their 14:10 departure from York fitted with my plans so I wasn't too upset.

It proved to be a good mistake to have made... the journey was smooth, with no station stops at all and it arrived on time.

Monday, March 02, 2009

I'm working from home today as I find it impossible to prepare and practise presentations in the office. I was planning to walk into Canary Wharf to pick up some lunch later. I might, however, go into the City instead.

Now, as we have already established, I am not a train-spotter. Nor do I fraternise with them. So I was careful not to appear too eager or to appear to be anything other than an inquisitive passer-by who had happened upon a crowd of people.

I fooled nobody.

A friendly middle-aged woman and her eighty-nine year-old mother asked me when the train was due. And a genuine passerby asked me what everybody was looking at.

You may recall that we corresponded some time ago on the subject ofMPs' attempts to limit scrutiny of their expenses by amending theFreedom of Information Act.

It would appear that Parliament is returning to this subject onThursday in another attempt to relieve MPs of the burdens they imposeon everybody else.

Could you let me know if you are in favour of the proposed changesand, if not, whether you plan to sign Jo Swinson's Early Day Motion onthe topic please?

The full text of the Early Day Motion is below.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Brown

Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009

That this House notes with concern the provisions in the Freedom ofInformation (Parliament) Order 2009 to exempt remove [sic] theexpenses of Members of Parliament and Peers from the scope of theFreedom of Information Act'; notes that this order will single out MPsand Peers in a special category as the only paid public officials whowill note [sic] have to disclose full details of their expenses; noteswith concern the regressive effect of this Order on Parliamentarytransparency and the detrimental impact it will have on Parliament inthe eyes of the public; calls on Ministers to block or repeal theOrder in the interest of MPs' and Peers' accountability to members ofthe public.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

The recent cold weather has resulted in an unpleasant build-up of condensation in the flat.

I can cope with slightly steamed up windows but when small pools of water started building up on window-ledges, it was time to do something about it.

Leaving windows open for long periods of time helps with the problem but it's not really a solution when the weather is as cold as now.

The cause is quite simple: too much moisture being produced (breathing, cooking, showering, etc) and too little air exchange with the outside (because it's COLD and the windows are CLOSED!)

I did some research and decided that the solution would be do invest in a dehumidifier. Sadly, it seems that everybody else has had the same idea and everywhere is out of stock.

I decided that the Delonghi DEM10 would be the best choice as it seems to get good feedback and it is priced keenly. Unfortunately, it seems to be out of stock everywhere. I stumbled upon one in the basement of John Lewis on Oxford Street last week and almost wept with joy. I stood guard over it while I furiously tried to get the attention of an assistant. When somebody finally came over, I was distraught to learn that it was the only one he had and that he was not prepared to sell it to me! Apparently it had been on display for six months and had undergone so much abuse that there was no chance it would work. I even offered to take it off his hands for £20 with a promise not to return it if it proved to be faulty. No joy: he wanted to keep hold of it as a demonstration model.

He did give me one piece of useful information, however. Apparently a container full of DEM10s was supposed to arrive in the UK before Christmas but didn't turn up. I suppose a missing container of a popular model, combined with a cold snap, might be enough to result in a nationwide shortage of pretty much all similarly-priced products.

So I returned to the web and stumbled upon a company that appears to specialise in nothing but Dehumidifers. Ebac appear to live and breathe dehumidifiers. Indeed, it looks like they make their own and have been doing so for some time. I suspect the £100 price point was not one they addressed until recently and so I had to hunt quite hard on their website until I found the "Amazon", which appears to be their entry-level model for price conscious people like me.

Now, I have to admit that I was initially somewhat suspicious. "Ebac" does look quite like "Ebay" so any company that names one of their best-selling products "Amazon" is either stunningly naive or trying just a little too hard to game the search engines.

Anyway, I thought I'd give them a go.

And I have to say that I'm impressed. The machine isn't pulling gallons of water out of the air but it is slowly but surely filling up the water container. More importantly, the condensation has almost completely gone. The bathroom mirror clears far more quickly after a shower and there are no unpleasant pools of water under the windows. So, I'm somewhat impressed so far.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

The train was full of train-spotter types with notepads and cameras. At least one of them was muttering things under his breath for most of the journey and there was near ecstasy amongst others when the train lost power in the tunnel and started rolling backwards.

It made me wonder at what point one makes the transition from being an "interested observer" to a trainspotter. My self image is strongly aligned with the former. But I can't stop worrying that I may have crossed the line and just not noticed...

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Now, I believe the operators and owners of these numbers receive fees from the caller (or their phone company) when calls to these numbers are made. BT say they'll absorb these costs.

So, what's to stop me signing up for hundreds of these numbers and then getting millions of people to call me? More likely, what's to stop a bad guy setting up hundreds of these numbers and then infecting those milions of computers in the country that still have modems and are connected to the phone line?

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Ian discovered last night that the Met Police were buying ads encouraging the public to report suspected terrorism.

Unfortunately, he discovered this when he noticed that the ads were being placed on his own site. The working assumption is that the police may, scandalously, be buying keywords as broad as "right wing".

I guess a Freedom of Information request might answer that particular question.

I typed the following four searches into Google. Try to guess which ones triggered the ad...

Right wing extremist

Left wing extremist

Muslim extremist

Animal extremist

Here are the results:

Right Wing Extremist

Ad appears in line with the search results and is highly visible:

Left Wing Extremist

No ad:

Muslim Extremist

Ad appears - but is way over to the right. I almost missed it

Animal Extremist

No ad

So I guess the implication is clear:

If you're worried about right-wing or religious extremists next door, the Met wants to hear from you.

If you live next door to a mad animal-rights lunatic, don't worry about it.

As for the last case, I guess it's rational for the Met not to waste money advertising on Google. I mean, if he lives next door to a crazed loon intent on wrecking the economy, Darling only has to step outside and tell the bobby guarding the entrance to No. 10 about it...